Interference Management -- An Information Theoretic View:

Starting with a review of interference alignment concepts, the focus of the talk will be on the robust principles of ignoring interference when it is weak and avoiding it when it is strong, in both cases exploring information theoretic optimality with very limited channel knowledge at the transmitters. Optimal interference avoidance will be shown to be essentially equivalent to the index coding problem which will then be explored from an interference alignment perspective. Ignoring interference, i.e., treating interference as noise will be shown to optimal for the entire capacity region within a constant gap if for each user, desired signal strength is no weaker than the sum of the strengths of the strongest interference caused by the user and the strongest interference suffered by the user, with all signal strengths measured in dB scale. Interesting open problems will be highlighted in the talk.

BIO:

Syed Ali Jafar received his B. Tech. from IIT Delhi, India, in 1997, M.S. from Caltech, USA, in 1999, and Ph.D. from Stanford, USA, in 2003, all in Electrical Engineering. His industry experience includes positions at Lucent Bell Labs, Qualcomm Inc. and Hughes Software Systems. He is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA USA. His research interests include multiuser information theory, wireless communications and network coding.

Dr. Jafar received the NSF CAREER award in 2006, ONR Young Investigator Award in 2008, School of Engineering Maseeh Outstanding Research Award in 2010, School of Engineering Mid-Career Excellence in Research Award in 2015, UCI Academic Senate Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research in 2015, and the Blavatnik National Laureate in Physical Sciences and Engineering in 2015. His co-authored papers received the IEEE Information Theory Society Best Paper Award in 2009, IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2013, IEEE Communications Society Heinrich Hertz Award in 2015, IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (to student co-authors) in 2015, an IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Award in 2012 and an IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Award in 2014. Dr. Jafar received the UC Irvine EECS Professor of the Year award five times, in 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2014, from the Engineering Students Council and the Teaching Excellence Award in 2012 from the School of Engineering. He was a University of Canterbury Erskine Fellow in 2010 and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2013-2014. Dr. Jafar was recognized as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher and included by Sciencewatch among The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014. He served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications 2004-2009, for IEEE Communications Letters 2008-2009 and for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2009-2012. Dr. Jafar was elevated to IEEE Fellow, Class of 2014, for contributions to analyzing the capacity of wireless communication networks.